Mapping Your Career Success
This excerpt is from Chapter Four:
Being seen from your last job
While I was Division Manager over Electronics Manufacturing, there was an opening for the Mechanical Division Manager position. I was interested to see if they were going to consider Pearl for the job. I met with my boss and asked him whether he had considered letting Pearl compete for the job. He was surprised, because Pearl was currently his Manufacturing Finance Manager. Since I knew Pearl’s work experience, I let him know she had two technical degrees and had run numerous manufacturing areas as well as Manufacturing Engineering in her past. He was not aware of her background, since he’d only worked with her in her current job. I made a note to watch for this in the future and have been surprised a few times myself when I’ve asked for employee work history folders and read them from cover to cover.
The moral of this story is, without boasting or being obnoxious, it never hurts to make your colleagues and supervisors aware of the full range of your work experience.
Try and ease it into conversations when it’s relevant. Say you’re working on a big presentation, and no one on your team seems to be sure which software would be best to use. If you’ve done this before, don’t be shy and offer to guide the team: “When I worked for Acme Corporation we had a similar situation, and I learned how to use GoToMeeting webinar software to conduct a live, cross-country meeting online. I’d be happy to show you how it works.”
Not only will your team be grateful, your boss is sure to notice. And of course, don’t forget to document as many aspects of the project as you can. In this case, you could do lots of interesting things:
* Save a copy of the meeting agenda you create
* Take screenshots on your computer that actually show how many people participated and what cities they called in from
* Print out copies of any slides you prepared ahead of time to share during the meeting
* You can even record an entire webinar, either in audio or video, which might be impressive if you were the moderator or an active participant in it
* Near the end of the webinar, you might even ASK for feedback from all attendees to evaluate the usefulness of the medium for future meetings. (They don’t have to know that you also want the feedback for your own portfolio!)
